Fletton Towers, Peterborough

History of Fletton Towers

Listed Building

Built between 1841 and 1847 for W Lawrence Clark of the Peace for the Liberty of Peterborough, to his own designs, with kitchen wing etc of 1860s. Large Tudor style stone house with freestone dressings. … Childhood home of novelist L P Hartley. 

Mary Liquorice’s book, The Hartleys of Fletton Tower, 1996, brings together the formative influences on the novelist Leslie Poles Hartley’s life from those locations and buildings that his family inhabited.

In his novel The Brickfield, Rookland Abbey is a thinly disguised Crowland Abbey. In the same novel the windmill is most likely Odam’s Mill at Eye which stood next to Eye Green railway station. St Botolph’s Lodge in the same book is probably based on St James’s Lodge, Postland, the home of L P Hartley’s own grandparents. His father was W J Thompson, local councillor in Crowland.

1900 The Peterborough Advertise announced “Mr H B Hartley is leaving Whittlesey and taking up his residence in Peterborough almost immediately. He has secured Fletton Tower as a temporary residence.” The temporary residence was to last for 95 years.

L P Hartley was sent away to school at the age of 13, first to Clifton, then Harrow. He was then at Balliol College Oxford until 1916 when he enlisted in the Norfolk Regiment, became a 2nd Lieutenant, and was invalided out in 1918. He then returned to Balliol and gained a degree in Modern History.